Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/356

342 of that most wholesome state of mind—suspended judgment; to assume the objective truth of speculations which, from the nature of the evidence in their favor, can have no claim to be more than working hypotheses.

The history of the "Aryan question" affords a striking illustration of these general remarks.

About a century ago, Sir William Jones pointed out the close alliance of the chief European languages with Sanskrit and its derivative dialects now spoken in India. Brilliant and laborious philologists, in long succession, enlarged and strengthened this position until the truth that Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Slavonian, German, Celtic, and so on, stand to one another in the relation of descendants from a common stock became firmly established, and thenceforward formed part of the permanent acquisitions of science. Moreover, the term "Aryan" is very generally, if not universally, accepted as a name for the group of languages thus allied. Hence, when one speaks of "Aryan languages," no hypothetical assumptions are involved. It is a matter of fact that such languages exist, that they present certain substantial and formal relations, and that convention sanctions the name applied to them. But the close connection of these widely differentiated languages remains altogether inexplicable, unless it is admitted that they are modifications of an original relatively undifferentiated tongue; just as the intimate affinities of the Romance languages—French, Italian, Spanish, and the rest—would be incomprehensible if there were no Latin. The original or "primitive Aryan" tongue, thus postulated, unfortunately no longer exists. It is a hypothetical entity, which corresponds with the "primitive stock" of generic and higher groups among plants and animals; and the acknowledgment of its former existence, and of the process of evolution which has brought about the present state of things philological, is forced upon us by deductive reasoning of similar cogency to that employed about things biological.

Thus, the former existence of a body of relatively uniform dialects, which may be called primitive Aryan, may be added to the stock of definitely acquired truths. But it is obvious that, in the absence of writing or of phonographs, the existence of a language implies that of speakers. If there were primitive Aryan dialects, there must have been primitive Aryan people who used them; and these people must have resided somewhere or other on the earth's surface. Hence philology, without stepping beyond its legitimate bounds and keeping speculation within the limits of bare necessity, arrives, not only at the conceptions of Aryan languages and of a primitive Aryan language, but of a primitive Aryan people and of a primitive Aryan home, or country occupied by them.